140,000 people were killed at the time of the explosion and by the end of 1945. The explosion was devastating and instantly wiped out the entire city. On the morning of the 6th of August 1945, Paul Tibbets flew an American B29 bomber plane, called ‘Enola Gay’, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the bomb named ‘Little Boy’ at 08:16 am local time. Hiroshima also had an important military base. This meant that it would be a better testing ground to examine the effects of the atomic bomb over a particular area. The Americans targeted Hiroshima because it had not yet been hit by their air raids. The Japanese wanted to negotiate the conditions of surrender and refused to give in to the demands of the Allies. He knew that the bomb had now been completed and effectively tested in the New Mexico desert and was ready for use.
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So, in July 1945, Truman offered the Japanese the chance to surrender. The Japanese army was huge and the President knew that he would lose hundreds of thousands of men, if he embarked on such a plan. They refused to surrender and so President Harry Truman thought about a possible invasion of the country. But the Japanese survived these attacks and were still very strong. Throughout the war, Allied forces heavily bombed Japan killing hundreds of thousands of people. They all worked at a special research site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Many of the people on Oppenheimer’s team were scientists who had escaped Nazi Germany.
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However, none of them were able to make the bomb before the Americans.īetween 19, the scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, led a group of experts on the Manhattan Project with the aim of making the world’s first atomic bomb. These countries included Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.
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Other countries also saw the appeal in having a very powerful weapon that would prevent their soldiers being killed in large numbers, as well as being able to stop enemies from making possible attacks on them. The idea only really got going after the Japanese bombed the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Roosevelt responded by setting up a group of experts to develop the idea in the United States. He told him about their ideas and the danger of the Nazis in Germany developing such a bomb for military use.